Hey all.
So my friends always make comments and ask “why are your Zoo’s tentacles/skirts are so long?” And I reply with “I no idea.” I buy them looking normal with short tentacles/skirts and in a few weeks they are long and flowing.
I have tried to find things on line, but came up short and did not know if anyone had the scoop. It is all the zoos, not just a few of them. I have a 55 gallon tank and a 48” Nova extreme pro TF high output light fixture. 3x54 watt daylight and 3x54 watt actinic’s. For flow Koralia 3 and Koralia 4.
Any one have any ideas? Not that it bugs me much but looks a little cooler when they have short tentacles and less blockage of the body/center.
-A Brown
I thought I would bump an old thread instead of creating a new one on this topic.
There is an explainable reason for a dramatic or marginal increase in skirt/tentacle lenght. Pulsating Xenia will not pulse if tank parameters are out of whack. They are like a canary in a coal mine as they are a great indicator of water quality. I have never shared this, but I always kept a very small patch in the corner or my tank and gave pieces away when it grew. It served as a quick first alert indicator if you will, of potential issues which I might have missed otherwise. That said, there are several reasons why you'll have skirt/tentacle increases or elongations and I shared this many years ago on another site. Optimal and usually medium high to high random flow along with great lighting will cause this. I have seen it dozens of times. Lighting and high flow, but not necessarily spot on parameters as often there will be marginal growth, but the physical changes are dramatic. My friend Dan is a perfect example as every single colony in his tank, even the frags had skirt lenght as long as fake eyelashes. I'm talking so long, that when the current shifted fom left to right, the skirts would lay over the oral disc to such lenghts that they would touch the shirts on the opposite side of the polyp. This was the case of every single polyp in his 60 gallon system, hundreds of polyps. This guy had this tank dialed in perfectly with 4 return nozzle, one at each top corner of his tank, rotating current every 30 seconds. It was stunning to see a tank full of eyelashes shifting to a different direction every 30 seconds.
The second reason is this. In captivity, the morphology of every polyp we keep in captivity has the potential to physically change dramatically as a results of the tank variables/parameters we expose them to. I will go dig up the article by a very respected man in his field, that I read many years ago to support this if anyone wants to read it. This is but one of the reasons polyps can and will behave, thrive or perish in one system and not in another. I have owned several colonies identical to a friend of mine. Some of them had skirt lenght twice as long as the exact same morphs he own in his tank. Conversely, he had polyps in his tank which had skirts twice as long as the same morph in my tank, yet both were happy, thriving and healthy. As with growth, another topic we just discussed on another sight, the variables we impose upon our biotopes, are the sole predictors and determining factors in growth, coloration, appearance etc.
If your tentacles have increased in lenght, that's a good thing. I wouldn't make any changes or try to even understand it. Just except that fact that you indeed have the preverbial blue thumb and you are indeed doing something right. It's just that simple.
I will go and try to dig up the article and share it.
MUCHO REEF
Zoanthids can be pretty mysterious sometimes.
